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Happiness is the fulfillment of a person’s strongest desires. In general, it appears in contrast to a feeling of dissatisfaction.

For example, hunger gives a sensation of pleasure from food, separation gives a sensation of joy from meeting a close and dear friend, etc. In other words, we are built so that we can feel something positive only from something negative.

Then the question arises: Is it worthwhile for us to aspire and yearn for happiness at all if first we must sink into suffering in order to feel happy later?

The fact is that the Kabbalistic method makes it possible for a person to experience happiness at the same time as feeling lack of fulfillment. In other words, at that very moment I taste something, I also feel a longing for that taste and its fulfillment.

I don’t need to divide this into time: now, I suffer, and later I receive. This is because for people who are involved with spiritual work, there is no question of time. They exist outside of time and move simultaneously through states of suffering and fulfillment, hunger and satiation.

This is the wisdom of Kabbalah, a wisdom about how to receive! It teaches a person to get what you want not in another month or year, but specifically at the moment you want it. Together with this, as a pair, two potentially opposite values are always operating simultaneously, plus and minus.

In our world, this doesn’t exist. Here, there is one big minus for which, in fact, we don’t get a plus. While according to the Kabbalistic method, the reception of pleasure itself invites in us a desire for it and its fulfillment.

Question: However, how does one do this? How is there happiness in this world in spite of it all?

Answer: This is possible only when I am not fulfilled independently, but through others. All happiness is latent in this because I never can fulfill myself by myself. However, if I feel and absorb the desires and deficiencies of others, by fulfilling them, I fulfill myself, for their desires become mine. It follows that I fulfill myself by existing in others.

The secret lies in the fact that I go outside of myself, discover desires and deficiencies outside of myself, accept them as mine and fulfill them. In other words, both desire and fulfillment are found outside of me, but this is my soul.

Question: Do we even fulfill a person’s physical desires like this?

Answer: We supply all of his desires, but only to a certain extent. The physical desires of a person are fulfilled only to the degree that his existence is provided for, and no more, whereas spiritual desires are fulfilled to the degree that we want to rise together because my elevation and his are mutually connected and complete each other.

In this manner, fulfillment of the desires of others gives us a feeling of happiness.[147499]From KabTV’s “Short Stories” 10/23/14